Tag: wireless

After another post pushing the virtues of a wireless system rather than a wired NBN, I have the following comments which I made on an article in iTWire.

– The wireless system is capable of reasonably high speed, but there is a latency issue which means anything where packet priority (read Skype/VOIP) is an issue, wireless will be a problem. Not surprising then that Telstra is pushing it as it will mean they keep their expensive phone line rentals.
– ADSL2+ is great if you live 10m from the exchange. Go onto whirlpool and you can see all the people that upgraded to 2+ and got no change in speed over standard ADSL. This is because speed drops off quickly the further you are from the exchange.
– FttN is really expensive to implement and speeds they are looking at seems to be no higher than you can get anyway. In 5 years time they will seem pathetic (as our speeds do now to much of the world)
– BPL (Broadband over power line) could have potential in the bush, and is currently being rolled out in the US for remote locations

In short there is no clear answer. The best solution would be a combination of the above. Maybe no fibre nodes within 1km of an exchange where ADSL2+ would be better, fibre nodes in the city and BPL in the country. One thing that seems clear though is that wireless is a supplementary connection and shouldn’t be regarded as your main connection unless we want to cripple our VOIP service and keep Telstra shareholders happy for the next 10 years!

Pushing wireless internet to faster and is probably a master move from Telstra. Increasing the speed of wireless seems to make it more and more attractive to the user (obviously there are the limits per tower). However the big strategy seems to me to be that a wireless network has high latency making VOIP next to useless. This means that it is fine for browsing, but Telstra maintains its stranglehold on the public which would need to keep their landlines.

Obviously this is great for Telstra shareholders, which the board of Telstra reports to at the end of the day, but useless for customers. Just one more reason why structural separation is probably the only way to go.

I have particular experience of this trying to use Skype video conference with someone using a wireless dongle in the UK. Both systems report 8MB down, but there is a huge issue with dropped packets on their end.